I represent the first generation who, when we were born, the television was now a permanent fixture in our homes. When I was born people had breakfast with Barbara Walters, dinner with Walter Cronkite, and slept with Johnny Carson.
Read the full "Pre-ramble"

On February 4, 1974, Patty Hearst, the
19-year-old daughter of newspaper publisher Randolph Hearst, is kidnapped from
her apartment in Berkeley, California, by two black men and a white woman, all
three of whom are armed. Her fiance, Stephen Weed, was beaten and tied up along
with a neighbor who tried to help. Witnesses reported seeing a struggling
Hearst being carried away blindfolded, and she was put in the trunk of a car.
Neighbors who came out into the street were forced to take cover after the
kidnappers fired their guns to cover their escape.

Three days later, the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA), a small U.S. leftist
group, announced in a letter to a Berkeley radio station that it was holding
Hearst as a "prisoner of war." Four days later, the SLA demanded that
the Hearst family give $70 in foodstuffs to every needy person from Santa Rosa
to Los Angeles. This done, said the SLA, negotiation would begin for the return
of Patricia Hearst. Randolph Hearst hesitantly gave away some $2 million worth
of food. The SLA then called this inadequate and asked for $6 million more. The
Hearst Corporation said it would donate the additional sum if the girl was
released unharmed.
In April, however, the situation changed dramatically when a surveillance
camera took a photo of Hearst participating in an armed robbery of a San
Francisco bank, and she was also spotted during a robbery of a Los Angeles
store. She later declared, in a tape sent to the authorities, that she had
joined the SLA of her own free will.
On May 17, Los Angeles police raided the SLA's secret headquarters, killing
six of the group's nine known members. Among the dead was the SLA's leader,
Donald DeFreeze, an African American ex-convict who called himself General
Field Marshal Cinque. Patty Hearst and two other SLA members wanted for the
April bank robbery were not on the premises.
Finally, on September 18, 1975, after crisscrossing the country with her
captors--or conspirators--for more than a year, Hearst, or "Tania" as
she called herself, was captured in a San Francisco apartment and arrested for
armed robbery. Despite her claim that she had been brainwashed by the SLA, she
was convicted on March 20, 1976, and sentenced to seven years in prison. She
served 21 months before her sentence was commuted by President Carter. After
leaving prison, she returned to a more routine existence and later married her
bodyguard. She was pardoned by President Clinton in January 2001.

February 7,
1964

The Beatles arrive on American
shores. "On the airplane, I felt
New York," Ringo Starr said many years later. "It was like an
octopus....I could feel, like, tentacles coming up to the plane it was so
exciting." For the better part of a year leading up to their arrival in
America on this day in 1964, the Beatles had been adjusting to the hysteria that
seemed to greet them wherever they went. They had grown somewhat accustomed to
the screaming hordes of teenage fans and the omnipresent pack of photographers,
cameramen and reporters. They had conquered Sweden, France, Germany and their
native England. Yet even the Beatles were nervous at the prospect of finally
visiting the United States, a country that had seemed to react indifferently to
the initial small-label release of singles like "Please Please Me"
and "She Loves You" almost a year earlier. "I know on the
plane over I was thinking, 'Oh, we won't make it,'" John Lennon later
recalled. "But that's that side of me. We knew we would wipe them out if
we could just get a grip."

Getting a grip would be difficult given the reception
that awaited them on the ground in New York.

"We got off the plane, and we were used to ten,
twelve thousand people, you know," Ringo later recalled. "It must
have been four billion people out there. I mean, it was just crazy!" The
Beatles were loose, poised and funny at the airport news conference amid the
bedlam of shouted questions and screaming fans. But on the ride into Manhattan,
Ringo says, they were as giddy as some of the fans who surrounded their limo as
it approached the Plaza Hotel. "It was madness! They were all outside and
there's barriers and horses and cops all over the place...with the four of us
sitting in the car, giggling. I'll speak for everybody—we couldn't believe it!
I mean, I'm looking out the car saying, 'What's going on? Look at this! Can you
believe this?' It was amazing."

Nowadays, scenes like those that greeted the Beatles
in America in February 1964 could be manufactured by any competent publicist
with a client who was willing to foot the bill. It would be impossible, though,
to manufacture the emotional impact of Beatlemania, both on the Beatles
themselves and on America. John, Paul, George and Ringo had developed an
airtight act both onstage and off, but they were still four working-class lads
from northern England, now being hailed as conquering heroes in the country whose
music had inspired them to become musicians in the first place. And America—not
just its teenagers, but the entire country—was still looking for a reason to
emerge from the shadow of the Kennedy assassination barely two months earlier.
New York found its reason on this day in 1964, and the rest of America followed
just two days later when the Beatles made their live television debut on The
Ed Sullivan Show.

Florida and James Evans and their three children live
in a rented project apartment, 17C, at 963 N. Gilbert Ave., in a housing project (implicitly the infamous Cabrini–Green projects, shown in the opening and
closing credits but never mentioned by name on the show)
in a poor, black neighborhood in inner-city Chicago. Florida's and James's
children are James, Jr., also known
as "J.J." (Jimmie Walker), Thelma (Bern Nadette Stanis),
and Michael
(Ralph Carter). When the series begins, J.J. and
Thelma are seventeen and sixteen years old, respectively, and Michael, called
"the militant midget" by his father due to his passionate activism, is eleven years old. Their exuberant
neighbor, and Florida's best friend, is Willona Woods (played by Ja'net Dubois), a recent divorcée who works at a boutique.
Their building
superintendent is Nathan Bookman (Johnny Brown), to whom James, Willona and later
J.J. refer as "Buffalo Butt", or, even more derisively,
"Booger".

February 9, 1964

America meets the Beatles on The Ed
Sullivan Show.

At
approximately 8:12 p.m. Eastern time, Sunday, February 9, 1964, The Ed
Sullivan Show returned from a commercial (for Anacin pain reliever),
and there was Ed Sullivan standing before a restless crowd. He tried to begin
his next introduction, but then stopped and extended his arms in the universal
sign for "Settle Down." "Quiet!" he said with mock gravity,
and the noise died down just a little. Then he resumed: "Here's a very
amusing magician we saw in Europe and signed last summer....Let's have a nice
hand for him—Fred Kaps!"

For
the record, Fred Kaps proceeded to be quite charming and funny over the next
five minutes. In fact, Fred Kaps is revered to this day by magicians around the
world as the only three-time Fédération Internationale des Sociétés Magiques
Grand Prix winner. But Fred Kaps had the horrific bad luck on this day in 1964
to be the guest that followed the Beatles on Ed Sullivan—possibly
the hardest act to follow in the history of show business.

It
is estimated that 73 million Americans were watching that night as the Beatles
made their live U.S. television debut. Roughly eight minutes before Fred Kaps
took the stage, Sullivan gave his now-famous intro, "Ladies and
gentlemen...the Beatles!" and after a few seconds of rapturous cheering
from the audience, the band kicked into "All My Lovin'." Fifty
seconds in, the first audience-reaction shot of the performance shows a teenage
girl beaming and possibly hyperventilating. Two minutes later, Paul is singing
another pretty, mid-tempo number: "Til There Was You," from the
Broadway musicalMusic Man. There's screaming at the end of
every phrase in the lyrics, of course, but to view the broadcast today, it
seems driven more by anticipation than by the relatively low-key performance
itself. And then came "She Loves You," and the place seems to
explode. What followed was perhaps the most important two minutes and 16
seconds of music ever broadcast on American television—a sequence that still
sends chills down the spine almost half a century later.

The
Beatles would return later in the show to perform "I Saw Her Standing
There" and "I Wanna Hold Your Hand" as the audience remained at
the same fever pitch it had reached during "She Loves You." This time
it was Wells & the Four Fays, a troupe of comic acrobats, who had to suffer
what Fred Kaps had after the Beatles' first set. Perhaps the only non-Beatle on
Sullivan's stage that night who did not consider the evening a total loss was
the young man from the Broadway cast of Oliver! who sang
"I'd Do Anything" as the Artful Dodger midway through the show. His
name was Davy Jones, and less than three years later, he'd star in a TV show of
his own that owed a rather significant debt to the hysteria that began on this
night in 1964: The Monkees.

CHILD OF TELEVISION @ iTunes

Pre-ramble

I represent the first generation whom, when we were born, the television was now a permanent fixture in our homes. When I was born people had breakfast with Barbara Walters, dinner with Walter Cronkite, and slept with Johnny Carson.
Read the full "Pre-ramble"